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Running with friends

After being back at work for a week and trying to get back up to speed on everything I was looking forward, but also a little nervous about my 22 mile run on Saturday with Susan and Sally, but I was really looking forward to catching up with Sally. I had been exhausted all week and wasn't sure that 22 miles was the cure for it. I had run more miles in the 8 days that I had been back then I did the whole last month of my trip to New Zealand (if you don't include hiking).

My view of the Trilliums this year in Forest Park.
I missed them in full bloom, since I was in New Zealand.

It was my week to pick the route, I was being lazy about the route and first thought that we could just run a straight trough 22 miles on Wildwood, but then thought to myself, "why have we been publishing all these routes in the blog if we don't reuse them". Luckily we have started tagging the distances, so we picked the 22 miler from "Running in pain", hoping that we wouldn't get stung this time.

Someone had a sense of humor about the mud puddles

The route wasn't incredibly hilly, but the hills we did have, especially Saltzman back to the car, kicked my butt. Normally it is Susan who walks a little on the hills and I pass her, but this run was the complete opposite. At some point during the run, I realized it wasn't work that was making me so tired, it was trying to keep-up with Susan everyday with her new (mean) workout routine she came up with while I was gone.

Strange green tagging on all the large trees on the Ridge Trail.

By the time I made it to the car I knew I was probably going to go home and pass out the rest of the afternoon. But that never happened, I got a text from Chris asking if I was going to come up and stay at my Mom's house near Mount Hood for the evening. I wasn't planning on it because it was suppose to be windy on the mountain, but he said him and Karrla might go running on Sunday. I hadn't seen Chris and Karrla since I had been back I thought it would be fun to go up and spend the evening with them, regardless if I went snowboarding or running the next day.

Of course we had fun catching up and of course on Sunday when they decided to run Salmon River, I didn't say no. It started to down pour on us when we got to the trail head, which eventually turned to snow, but it was fun to be back on that trail nonetheless.

I had a lot of fun catching up with everyone this weekend #trailrunning. Almost as much fun as catching up with everyone at Double Mountain, maybe I'll save that for next weekend.

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Ann's story (the planning)
Ever since I did my first multi-day
backpacking trip 10 years ago, I have wanted to circumnavigate Mt. Hood. We
actually planned a backpacking trip to do in 2007, but after doing some
research realized part of the trail had been washed out and was closed. So the Mt.
Hood circumnavigation was put on the back burner until I started running long
distances.

I mentioned to Susan last summer that we should do it, but it wasn’t
until early this year when we were trying to find a race during the summer that
was 40 – 50 miles and fit both of our schedules that I mentioned we should just do Mt. Hood. It worked out great, since we could do it during
the week when there is less traffic on the trail and we wouldn’t have to give up a
weekend day with our families.

I really love planning hiking, backpacking, and running routes / trips. I loved being able to pull out all my maps and books, and comb through them for training runs and the circumnavigation, but single
mo…